Re: How to game the system (was Re: What does 95th %tile mean?)

[Travis Pugh <tpugh () shore net>]

The one that surprises me is that carriers haven't introduced the concept
of "off-peak" billing.  Under my 95% billing from upstreams at shore.net,
we could have packed the off-peak hours with data and not impacted our
costs at all.  It doesn't seem too difficult to shop for enterprise
customers who need to move batch data from one place to another, sell them
a circuit, and give them a sharply reduced rate as long as their peaks
happen between 12:00 am EST and 6:00 am EST.  All I'm doing at that point
is filling the "valleys" on my transit graphs with free data, since I'm
paying for (almost) peak utilization anyway.

-travis

On Fri, 20 Apr 2001, Leo Bicknell wrote:

>       There is a much simpler game that costs the ISP a lot more
> money.  Fortunately, it's not a common business model.
>
>       Let's say I am a TV network, and I want to simulcast a TV
> show once a week to the Internet.  I might need 2-3 Gig of capacity
> during the simulcast, but the rest of the time I need none.  So,
> I buy 95% service, stream for 4 hours a month, which is thrown away
> in any of the counting schemes put forth so far, and pay nothing.
>
>       Lather, rinse, repeat with each TV show.  There's no incentive
> to buy a bundle of service and stream all the shows (more approximating
> continuous usage) from one place.
>
>       Fortunately this application is small, but if you were a
> web hoster you could do the same thing with multiple providers.  
> With 20 providers, you could move your bandwidth with that provider
> only 5% of the time, paying nothing for service with any of them.
>
> -- 
> Leo Bicknell - bicknell () ufp org
> Systems Engineer - Internetworking Engineer - CCIE 3440
> Read TMBG List - tmbg-list-request () tmbg org, www.tmbg.org